Positive and Negative Human Traits
Recently, a fellow subscriber to the Karmayogi.net forum asked why does hate, anger, love, curiosity, admiration, etc. exist in the world. It was a very innocent yet important question that I would like to address. Seekers of the Spirit throughout time have noticed that the Divine Reality expresses in various ways, including Peace, Oneness, Wisdom, Knowledge, Creativity, Beauty, Goodness, Love, Delight, Power, Timelessness, and Infinity. These are also qualities that the Supreme seeks to manifest in the forms of creation. We humans are the means by which they take shape on earth. Interestingly, though the Intent of the Supreme was/is to spread these spiritual aspects throughout the cosmos, they initially took shape in their opposite form, as an inversion. I.e. life first emerged in the universe as unconscious physical matter; and only after, emerged higher, more conscious forms. Thus, life, and indeed we humans have roots in unconsciousness mixed with the consciousness. And we have come to embody them in the form of both positive and negative character traits -- expressing the physical, vital, and mental levels. An obvious question is why would a Divine Reality allow for both formations of darkness and light? Why not just manifest Its own, infinitely positive spiritual attributes? The answer is that it did so to enable the greatest variety, multiplicity, and possibility of experience. If there were only good traits, the diversity and depth of our life experiences would be limited. Thus, over time, a vast array of positive, neutral, and negative physical, vital, and mental traits came to be. For example, feelings like fear, anger, hatred, are negative expressions that originate in the vital plane of our being. (The vital is the dimension of sensation, desire, emotion, feeling, attitude, and social interaction.) It turns out that not only are these negative expressions inversions of their positive spiritual counterpart of Oneness, Power, Love, etc., but inversions of our own positive human traits. For example, people who hate, secretly harbor love, but through circumstance inner and outer, have inverted to its darker side. A child might hate a parent because of their abuse, but secretly harbored intense love that reversed itself. In fact, the more intense the hate, the greater the possibility of love when the obstacles are overcome. In humanity's evolution we emerged from physical existence where our physical traits predominated, such as hunting and other survival skills, to the development of more complex vital feelings and relationships, such as trade, cooperation, and affinity toward marriage, to sophisticated traits of the mind, such as analyzing, synthesizing, calculating, rational thinking, etc. These are positive or neutral characteristics developed over the course of human evolution. And yet there are also negative qualities that developed, such as mental ignorance and falsehood. At the vital and physical levels there are far more and more virulent forms of negative character traits because as you go lower in human consciousness, the wanting characteristics tend to appear. Anger, hate, intense desire, lust, jealousy, et al are negative vital traits; while domination, tendency to violence, et al are examples of negative physical characteristics. And so we see how life evolved both a plethora of qualities in the human, both positive and negative, to enable the greatest variety of experience, from which we can evolve our nature and through that discovery experience delight. There are hundreds of human qualities that express at the physical, vital, and mental level; often centrally in one, though with a slight shading of another. E.g. attitudes are vital, but they have a slight mental aspect to them. Personal values and beliefs are predominantly mental, but also have a vital component in that there is a willful aspect. If traits of human consciousness express positively and negatively, then we can take inventory of all of them, and determine where we are lacking. If we then make the sincere effort to strengthen the positive or overcome negative, we grow as individuals; plus it is highly likely that life will quickly respond in our favor to our efforts. We also see several general wanting propensities in our nature. For one, many of our negative traits at the physical, vital, and mental level have at their root human Ego. It is the self-absorption and separativeness of our being that has at its very root the fact that we identify with our own separate bodies and self at the expense of others. The ego expresses as different levels, corresponding to the dimensions of our being -- physical vital, and mental. For example, the need to dominate another is an expression of the physical ego. Hate and anger are expressions of the vital ego that has been bruised. Many negative human traits are due to another overriding factor; our essential Ignorance born of creation. Our Ignorance has its roots in the unconsciousness and non-knowledge of our physical body, which is an expression of the dumb, material matter that it is based on. Stupidity, ignorance, falsehood, folly, error-proneness, , poor decision making capacity, et al are examples of these. In conclusion, the human individual is made up of hundreds if not thousands of traits that express positively and negatively. They are expressions of Divine Will that seeks multiplicity of expression in the universe to allow for infinite diversity, and therefore infinite variety of consciousness and bliss as each of us discover our Higher Nature. Category:Personality Category:Personality Profiling Category:Human Makeup